Slider

Karma: 1,538

Slider 5 Dec 2022 22:10 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: College Admissions as a Brutal One-Shot Game
Ivy league colleges: the game that you win before the game begins.

Slider 5 Dec 2022 14:28 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: the gears to ascenscion’s comment on: Take 3: No indescribable heavenworlds.
I happened to stumble on an old comment where I was already of the opinion that progress is not a “refinement” but will “defocus” from old division lines.
At some midskill “fruitmaximisement” peaks and those that don’t understand things beyond that point will confuse those that are yet to get to fruitmaximization and those that are past that.
If someone said “you were suboptimal on fruit front, I fixed that mistake for you” and I arrive at a table with 2 worm apples, I would be annoyed/pissed. I am assuming that the other agent can’t evaluate their cleanness—it’s all fruit to them.
One could do similarly with radioactive apples etc. In a certain sense yes, it is about ability to percieve properties and even I use the verb “evaluate”. But I don’t find the break so easy to justify between preferences and evaluations. Knowing and opining that “worminess” is a relevant thing is not value neutral. Reflecting upon “apple with no worm” and “apple with worm” can have results that overpower old reflections on “apple” vs “pear” even thought it is not contradicted (wormless pear vs wormful apple is in a sense “mere adversial example” it doesn’t violate species preference but it can absolute render it irrelevant).
My example of wacky scenarios are bad. I was thinking that if one holds that playing Grand Theft Auto is not unethical and “ordinary murder” is unethical, then if it turns out that reality is similar to GTA in “relevant way” this might be a non-trivial reconciliation. There is a phenomenon of referring to real life people as NPCs.
The sharedness was about like a situation with a book like Game Of Thrones. In a sense all the characters are only parts of a single reading experience. And Jaime Lannister still has to use spies to learn about Arya Starks doings (so information passing is not the thing here). If a character action could start the “book to burn” Westeros internal logic does not particularly help to opine about that. Doc warning Marty that the stakes are a bit high here, is in a sense introducing previously incomprehensibly bad outcomes.
The particular dynamics are not the focus but that we suddenly need to start caring about metaphysics. I wrote a bit long for explaining bad examples.
From the dialogue on the old post

Is this bad according to Alice’s own preferences? Can we show this? How would we do that? By asking Alice whether she prefers the outcome (5 apples and 1 orange) to the initial state (8 apples and 1 orange)?
Expecting super-intelligent things to be consistent kind of assumes that if a metric ever becomes a good goal higher levels will never be weaker on that metric, that maximation strictly grows and never decreases with ability for all submetrics.
This is written with competence in mind but I think it still work for taste as well. Fruit-capable Alice indeed would classify worm-capable Alice to be a stupid idiot and a hellworld. But I think that doing this transition and saying “oops” is the proper route. Being very confident that you opine on properties of apples so well that you will never-ever say “oops” in this sense is very closeminded. You should not leave fingerprints on yourself either.

Slider 5 Dec 2022 13:46 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Is the “Valley of Confused Abstractions” real?
I encountered a similarish pattern a long time ago
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RQpNHSiWaXTvDxt6R/coherent-decisions-imply-consistent-utilities?commentId=9Fm2zrYT9aRSdzSde

Slider 5 Dec 2022 13:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Slider’s Shortform
Not comenting on the referenced content as here we are at:
epistemic status: crazy corner
Something that is very resonant to the approach but has a big point of deviation https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rCZ9fruWriD6uGNLp/who-are-some-prominent-reasonable-people-who-are-confident
$30 for each link that leads to me reading
Total bounty capped at $600, first come first served.
I have a ideological beef with that “first come first served” bit. At 20 links the cap is exactly filled. If you receive 40 links each linker should get 15$. Even as is, it is nearly impossible to tell whether you are the 22nd linker because of the time gap when 20th link is received and the gap is announced fullfilled might be something like 2 days. With my style there would be a rollingly updated display of what is the current bounty per link, after 80 links new linkers can expect to only ever get up to 7.5$. A real reservation is that if I go fetching a link with 30$ in my mind but eventually only get 15$ I might feel cheated. But the promise isn’t super solid as a “sorry, you were just out of time” can still net you 0$.
At some point you would “close the market”, submissions stop being accepted and money is doled out. The advantage of this old style is that each submission can get instantly rewarded instead of being delayed.
One could also imagine a kind of reverse operation where rather than fetching information we are broadcasting it
$30 for each early access reader
Total paywall capped at 600$, distributed equally among readers
Then a paper having 40 readers would cost 15$ for each new reader to access. This kind of market we do not need to close for the producer, after the 20th reader the author has got their 600$ compensation and the rest is just new readers resharing the burden amongs the old readers.
If you are wondering “who tf would go fetching a link for uncertain reward” then you should be of the opinion that these read licences should sell like hotcakes. “This authors last paper cost 400$ distributed among 4 million readers for which has access price of 0.0001 $. Since you were the 1 millionth reader you have 0.0003 $ free credits to use . Would you be interested to access the new paper costing 600$ that has 600 current readers for access price of $1?”

Slider 5 Dec 2022 0:39 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aiyen’s comment on: Is school good or bad?
Oh right, the whole world doesn’t have education as a right.
Are you trying to argue from existing law to moral or practical value? That would be easier if the whole world hadn’t had slavery and monarchy until fairly recently.
My tone is bad and inappropriate especially in this contex. What I actually mean or should have meant is that “parents lose money” is not really descriptive of my local reality and I have trouble taking on that perspective. Trying to imagine a counterfactual what would have needed to be different to not have universal education starts to baffle me a little. My brains come up with questions like “Do people in this world have to pay the police if they call them to protect from gunmen?” which are more obviously out of touch what I know to be the case. The money loss is a facet of some corners of reality. I am familiar with the organization where teachers are first accountable to society or state rather than accountable through parents. So “What are we paying you for?” has two sides to it that I am extremely unfamiliar with.
What I am used to is that the public option is mostly appropriate, so children and parents are not constantly trying to escape it. Keeping “study duty” firm has for me the most important role that a parent while having large custodial rights may not fail to educate their kid. Alternative venues are fine but they can’t be shambles, they must be worthy of the dignity of the progeny of civilization (so need to pass goverment checks). So if private schools are a large part of the equation why are not parents using the customisability if they are going the hard route anyway? If students are suffering why are the parents not advocating for their kids needs? Is it because the solutions exist but are paywalled and some that need them can not get them? How come the public options gets a pass for maleducating a significant stream of citizens? Is this some kind of thing where the most prestigious places are prestigious because they are harsh (and failures are because of students and not schools) and thus misery is a sign of status?
But jobs ideally produce value. School often doesn’t,
The word “value” has so different meaning in job context and school context that I am not confident on which idea this expresses and can’t really follow.
In general I am very interested in finding out and rooting out bad schooling whereever it might be. But I think it might be appropriate to talk about specific schoolings rather than the abstract idea of schooling in general.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 21:35 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: the gears to ascenscion’s comment on: Take 3: No indescribable heavenworlds.
Yes, the edgecases are the things which kill perfectly good theories.
I would be pretty surprised if you said that your ethical stance would incorporate without hiccups if it turned out that simulation hypothesis is true. Or that the world shares one conciousness. So I am guessing that the total probability of all that funky stuff taken together is taken to be low. So nobody will ever need more than 640k. 10 000 years of AGI powered civilization and not one signficant hole will be found. That is an astonishingly strong grasp of ethics.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 21:08 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aiyen’s comment on: Is school good or bad?
Oh right, the whole world doesn’t have education as a right.
It does apply also to start of school. It is about developmentally appropriate environments. Schools are supposed to be where that can be a high objective. Keeping up skill development in work is rather hit and miss and can be quite narrow for profitability increasement.
That both destroy magic doesn’t mean the destruction is it to the same degree. And school has its own magic. Jobs tend to have way less magic of their own.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 18:13 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: Take 3: No indescribable heavenworlds.
Sure that is a common way to derive the challenge for physics that way.
But we can have it via other routes. Digits of pi do not listen to commands on what they should be. Chess is not mean to you when it is intractable. Failure to model is a lack of imagination rather than a model of failure. Statements like “this model is correct and nothing unmodeled has any bearing on its truth or applicability” are so prone to be wrong that they are uninteresting.
I do give that often “nature” primarily means “material reality” when I could have phrased it as “reality has no oblication to be clear” to mean a broader thing. To the extent that observing a target does not change it (I am leaving some superwild things out), limits on ability to make a picture tell more about the observer rather than the observed. It is the difference of a positive proof of a limitation vs failure to produce a proof of a property. And if we have a system A that proves things about system B, that never escapes the reservations about A being true. Therefore it is always “as far as we can tell” and “according to this approach”.
I do think it is more productive to think that questions like “Did I do right in this situation?” have answers that are outside the individual that formulates the question. And that this is not bound to particular theories of rigthness. That is whatever we do with ethics (grow / discover / dialogue build etc) we are not setting it as we go. That activity is more of the area of law. We can decide what is lawful and what is condoned but we can’t similarly do to what is ethical.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 11:32 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: the gears to ascenscion’s comment on: Take 3: No indescribable heavenworlds.
The take is a gross overcorrection to the stuff that it critisises. Yes, you need to worry about indescribable heaven worlds. No, you have not got ethics figured out. No, you need to keep updating your ontology. No, nature is not obligated to make sense to you. Value is actually fragile and can’t withstand your rounding.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 10:29 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Is school good or bad?
Voting behaviour would very weakly test for that bit. I am imagining a test of hypotheticals and calssifying as “yes” or “no” on whether the scenario is consistent with the role. Voting against someone because of influence of hate adds is hard to separate from voting against somebody for transgressions against political organization.
Having solely economic justifications has the danger of narrowing education to only vocational education. But I guess having just some measure that does not get instantly warped doesn’t particularly care what flavour it is.
I know that some people have a mindset that everything should be measured but it is not intuitive to me why this would be universal. I get that there should not be disagreement on what is the performance and what would be a breach. But that it can always be understood as a quantity and never a duty or a quality is not immidietly obvious to me.
I know that other countries have high monetary involment in colleges and colleges are more used for class distinguishment which I understand if it boosts the signal side of it. To me it would be more natural for colleges to complain to high schools that the opening college courses need to be more extensive as the previous stage was slacking. That kind of dynamic does not particularly care about grade distribution among the students. But if it is about particular students getting to particular colleges then I understand that gets shadowed. It seems to me the role of “low end” tetriary education is somewhat different. Having a system where it makes sense to play even if you “lose” is very different from a game where if you “lose” then it is almost as good as if you did nothing.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 9:50 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Take 3: No indescribable heavenworlds.
Assuming and leaning on the assumption that systematically you will never mess up is very dangerous. An anti-murphy law, “everything that could go wrong will be okayish because otherwise we would be dead already”.
I think it is a very solid phenomenon that pushing science forward will not diminsh the capability to be surprised. Models have limits. Singularities in the sense of “here our models breakdown and we can’t anticipate what happens” are a real thing. Trying to classify and opine about a world that is in that singularity area of your models I would not call “describable”.
That we can’t rule out that an exotic state is good does not constitute a reason to think it is good. If we have reasons to think a world is bad, that we have doubts about it does not mean that we have (yet) lost reason to think so. Doubting inconvenient models is a not a get-out-of-jail-free card. But having a model does not oblige you to trust without verification.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 9:14 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Slider’s comment on: Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal
Since writing this post I have connected that then-unnamed-to-me-thing which is contrasted to pareto improvement is probably Kaldor-Hicks improvement .
Reflecting on the post topic and wikipedia criticisms section (quoted so it can’t be changed underneath)
Perhaps the most common criticism of the Kaldor-Hicks criteria is that it is unclear why the capacity of the winners to compensate the losers should matter, or have moral or political significance as a decision criteria, if the compensation is not actually paid.
If everybody keeps doing Kaldor-Hicks improvements then over different issues everybody racks minor losses and major wins. This is a little like a milder form of acausal trade. Its challenge is similarly to keep the modelling of the other honest and accurate. To actually compensate we might need to communicate consent and move causal goods etc. Taking personal damage in order to provide an anonymous unconsented gift with no (specified) expectation of reciprocity can be psychologically demanding. And in causing personal gain while costing others it would be tempting to downplay the effect on others. But if you can collectively do that you can pick up more money than pareto-efficiency and get stuck in fewer local optima. If the analysis fails it actually is a “everybody-for-themselfs” world while everybody deludes themselfs that they are prosocial or a world of martyrs burning down the world. The middle zone of this and pareto-efficiency is paretists lamenting a tragedy of coordination failure of lacking reassurances.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 8:49 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Pattern’s comment on: Challenges to Yudkowsky’s Pronoun Reform Proposal
The one that has the word “astalo”.
(I am keeping my identity small by not needlessly invoking national identities)
I seemed to also have a misunderstanding about the word. It is rather something used as a melee weapon that is not a melee weapon as an object. Something that in DnD terms would be an “improvised weapon”. But it seems that affordance of ranged weapon is not included in that, the “melee” there is essential (and even that blunt damage is in and slashing and piercing are out). Still a term that is deliberately very wide, but as the function is also to mean very specific things getting it wrong is kinda bad.

Slider 4 Dec 2022 0:07 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: dkirmani’s comment on: Is school good or bad?
I am all for stimulating stuff to do. That sounds like a case where personal lack of money is not a significant factor. To me it would seem that doing that stuff as a hobbyist would be largely similar (ie money is a nice bonus but tinkering would happen anyway because of intrinsic interest / general development).
Not being able to mess with computers because your parents needed hands to pull potatoes from fields would probably also made it hard to be a relevant blip when that employer was searching for talent. I am also more worried about when it systematically affects a lot of people, when “so where do you work?” you would get an eyebrow raising answer “I in fact do not work, but my mother insisted that I should go to school” from a 10 year old. It would actually probably be working a fast food joint to pay on the family car loan interest.
If we could make work so enriching that it would bring people up all their life then maybe it would be developmentally desirable environment. But as long as you will have adult unemployed people, I consider the job of children to be playing and any employed minor to be a person that is inappropriately not playing. Then offcourse if a framework where education is preparation to be a cog in a factory leads to schools being even more stiffling than actual factories, having a artifically stably bad environment is worse than unstably bad environment.
In certain sense this “prepatory phase” lasts until the end of tetriary education. I am of the impression that “mid stage” people do not push off their work to pick up new skill. By doing the aquisitions early in life we have it “installed” and pay dividends during most of the lenght of life. But the environment where you develop the capabilities and where you can use out of them are different. And the transition costs between them are not always trivial.

Slider 3 Dec 2022 21:29 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Is school good or bad?
Adults would be a lot more simpler as the time that childhood has time to make its magic would be shorter. More labour supply, lower job complexity and blander humans. I am not super confident with the specifics but quite certain that childhood is doing important effects.

Slider 3 Dec 2022 21:11 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Is school good or bad?
Why are economic justifications the important justifications? If I give an instruction of “teach this kid about separation of powers”, the civic justifications are quite clear, while the economic justifications would be quite nebolous and I think the criteria would not be that up in the air.
Also a list of memorized facts is not the main way you would enable a citizen to reject goverment overreach. I am a bit surprised that the teacher would be scared of a low outcome. I guess it makes somewhat sense if it is a PvP ranking game among students and among teachers. But for building actual capabilities some is always in addition and very rarely backwards. I would also imagine that where egypt knowledge would actually be used in the actor would still actively fill in details they need in their specific function. Then it doesn’t matter so much whether you were teached A and had to pick up B or whether you were teached B and had to pick up A. And having feel and context for egypt is largely ambivalent about what specific things you know (so that when you encounter a timeline placing egypt, rome and america you are not completely bewildered and can relate).

Slider 3 Dec 2022 20:49 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Is school good or bad?
When I was watching the serier Wire there was a depiction of school circumnstances and one of the points seemed to be that the teacher was frustrated with the conditions. It seemed odd that is was supposed to be commenting on real world conditions.
The problem (depicted and what I understand) is not that the supervising examinaations woudl be added paperwork and prepartion angst for the students. Rather it is that the teacher is supposed to teach so much in so little time that there is only room for the most route skim on everything. It is teaching to the test, every student barely passes the test (out of those that do). Minimized time budjet and maximised content expectation from school toward the teacher. No slack at all, constantly teetering on the edge of it being possible at all.
I guess the argument is that the current state is that we care so little about the effect of teaching that no effect is a acceptable outcome. And therefore caring to test that there is more effect than no effect would be an improvement. I feel like the essential part of that is the lack of care.
If you have the expectation that the thing wil not be done if you do not check for it, that is a very low trust attitude. In case you have trust you only need to start monitoring when you lose that trust. If you have to tease and pressure the agent to do the principals bidding you are only going to get exactly what you ask for. Empowering the agent you might get stuff that was not previously tested for. You can’t get Goodharted so bad if you do not micromanage while throwing more resources at it will get you more.
It is quite easy to think of a doctor that is tired and hurries up the patient in order to get enough patients served for that day, looking at X-rays while not listening to pain descriptions. Difference between 10 and 15 patients served is easy to verify. Misdiagnoses or missed depression diagnosis are hard to verify and to pin the causal pathway.
I am also sure that (some) hedge fund managers can appriciate not killing their gold egg laying geese. Or that in data analysis working smart instead of hard might be quite essential. Or that spending some networking time with billoinares is quite an acceptable excuse to be making only 50% volume of trades that day.

Slider 3 Dec 2022 19:45 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: Is school good or bad?
It is kind of ironic that in my local culture the stance is more that by not focusing on testing school and teachers have room to care about learning.
“they do not actually care” seems to not describe my local reality.

Slider 3 Dec 2022 19:39 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Is school good or bad?
I know pretty solidly that society should not reinstate child labour. So it totally depends how they are supposed to spend their days then. The trivial option of just keeping child labour forbidden and keeping them loose is a surprisingly strong candidate compared to keeping them in school. But I would expect a real option to have some structures present.

Slider 3 Dec 2022 19:30 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Utilitarianism is the only option
Knowing your own suffering is on a pretty solid footing. But in taking into account how we impact others we do not have direct perception. Essentially I deploy a theory-of-mind that blob over there probably corresponds to the same kind of activity that I am. But this does not raise anywhere near to self-evident bar. Openness or closedness has no import here. Even if I am that guy over there, if I don’t know whether they are a masochist or not I don’t know whether causing them to experience pain is a good action or not.
The other reason we have to be cautious when following valence utilitarianism is that there’s no way to measure conscious experience. You know it when you have it, but that’s it.
Does this take imply that if you are employing numbers in your application of utilitarianism that you are doing a misapplication? How can we analyse that a utility monster does not happen if we are not allowed to compare experiences?
The repugnancy avoidance has an issue of representation levels. If you have a repugnant analysis, agreeing with its assumptions is inconsistent to disagreeing with its conclusions. That is when you write down a number (which I know was systematically distanced from) to represent suffering, the symbol manipulations do not ask permission to pass a “intuition filter”. Sure you can say after reflecting a long time on a particular formula that its incongruent and “not the true formula”. But in order to get the analysis started you have to take some stance (even if it uses some unusual and fancy maths or whatever). And the basedness of that particular stance is not saved by it having been possible that we could have chosen another. “If what I said is wrong, then I didn’t mean it” is a way to be “always right” but forfeits meaning anything. If you just use your intuitive feelings on whether a repugnant conclusion should be accepted or not and do not refer at all to the analysis itself, the analysis is not a gear in your decision procedure.
Open individualism bypassing population size problem I could not really follow. We still phase a problem of generating different experience viewpoints. Would it not still follow that it is better to have a world like Game of Thrones with lots of characters in constanly struggling conditions than a book where the one single protagonist is the only character. Sure both being “books” gives a ground to compare them on but if comparability keeps addition it would seem that more points of view leads to more experience. That is if we have some world state with some humans etc and an area of flat space and then consider it contrasting to a state where instead of being flat there is some kind of experiencer there (say a human). Even if we disregard borders it seems this is a strict improvement in experience. Is it better to be one unified brain or equal amount of neurons split into separate “mini-experiencers”? Do persons with multiple personality conditions contribute more experience weight to the world? Do unconcious persons contribute less weight? Does each ant contribute as much as a human? Do artists count more? The repugnant steps can still be taken.